There were evenings when I sat alone in the bathroom with the faucet running because I didn't want the boys to hear me crying.
But there was laughter too.
More than I ever expected.
Eli was the first to become fascinated with electronics.
At six, he dismantled a broken alarm clock and spread the pieces across our kitchen table.
I discovered him examining the circuit board with the seriousness of a surgeon.
“Sweetheart, why did you take that apart?”
He looked up.
“Because it stopped working.”
“Were you going to fix it?”
He considered the question.
“I wanted to know why it stopped.”
Owen, who had been watching from his chair, announced, “And I'm going to make it better.”
That became their pattern.
Eli wanted to understand things.
Owen wanted to improve them.
One examined every problem until he understood its hidden structure.
The other imagined possibilities nobody else had considered.
